Social Responsibility at Stellar

Our commitment to the community

Stellar Consulting Group helps businesses, government agencies and non-profits to gain important insights from data. We want every organisation to achieve optimal performance, get closer to their customers and deliver innovative solutions that achieve maximum impact.

That’s not easy, however, for many non-profit groups. They often face overwhelming demand for their services, yet have far too few resources. For most, a fully fledged data analytics system is just a dream.

At Stellar, we believe that the important work of non-profits deserves support from all parts of our community. We work with some of these organisations to design, build and support business intelligence solutions, often with the help of our partners, such as the Microsoft Technology for Good initiative. Our work on this type of project is pro bono or heavily discounted.

Stand Children’s Services

Stand works with some of the most disadvantaged families in New Zealand, supplying services in homes and in the community, as well as providing respite care in Children’s Villages. It’s work that costs the government – and society as a whole – billions of dollars every year.

Microsoft’s Cloud for Good initiative, announced in 2016 with a pledge of US$1 billion in cloud services to assist not-for- profits (NFPs) and university researchers over three years, has underpinned a transformation at Stand. After being selected as a community strategic partner by Microsoft, Stand was put in touch with Stellar to develop a data and analytics solution.

Using Microsoft’s Azure public cloud services, Stellar has been able to provide a highly scalable and robust data and analytics solution for Stand. Costing less than NZD$0.20 per user per month to operate, Stellar’s Azure-based public cloud solution is helping to ensure that Stand’s limited financial resources stretch further than ever.

“Now, it’s very quick for us to spot the outliers and high-risk cases, and we can also tell where we have bottlenecks in our organisation that are impacting our front-line services,” says Stand CIO Richard Parry. “We see clients faster, deal with them much more efficiently, and their outcomes will be better because we can spot potential problems before they happen.”

Stellar’s work with Stand was acknowledged with the 2017 Microsoft New Zealand award in the Technology for Good category.

Royal New Zealand Plunket Society

As perhaps the country’s best-known not-for-profit agency, Plunket provides health, development and wellbeing services to every child in New Zealand, designed to make a difference during their first 1000 days.

Like many organisations, Plunket has been focusing on how technology and information will be critical in moving forward.

“The more we know about children, and can map outcomes to the conditions and demographic situations we see, the more we can help people,” says Mike Rankin, Plunket’s head of business intelligence. “The greater the understanding we can create for nurses, the more they can help those families that really need it.”

The challenges for Plunket included gathering all of the experience and knowledge of hundreds of nurses across the country, building a repository of information and then making it accessible. That’s where Stellar Consulting Group was able to help.

Stellar’s data solution delivered an easy-to-use dashboard for Plunket staff, and work on the next stage, a data warehouse, is currently underway.

“The solution that Stellar has developed with Stand came together in only six weeks and can be repurposed in and out of New Zealand across government, non-government and private sector organisations that deliver a wide array of social services.”